


backwash

by deathstranded



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Aftermath, Character Study, Healing is Not A Linear Process, M/M, Married Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Panic Attacks, Parent Death, Past Child Abuse, Returning Home, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:28:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23398474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathstranded/pseuds/deathstranded
Summary: sonia kaspbrak dies.eddie picks up the pieces.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 17
Kudos: 188





	backwash

**Author's Note:**

> hello. here is a little fic i have been chipping away at for months that is finally DONE. in this verse, either the losers killed It as children or they haven't faced It for a second time yet - doesn't matter. only thing that matters is they didnt forget and richie and eddie got married as they should have all along. because maybe the real clown slaughter was the adolescent trauma we overcame along the way.

Richie comes with him, even though Eddie had insisted that it was _fine_ , he didn’t need Richie to come along, he’d just be bored, and when that hadn’t worked, he’d told him that he would no doubt end up annoying him and getting in the way, and really the whole process would be a lot easier and a lot faster if he just went and sorted everything out himself. And when that hadn’t worked, he’d reminded Richie that he was supposed to be filming for Conan that week, and he had a fitting for the Emmys, and a writing session planned with Alison and Jun. 

Richie, much to Eddie’s private relief, had seen straight through the bull, and said he was coming along anyway. 

He’d not mentioned anything of the real reason, for which Eddie was extremely grateful; instead he’d pointed out that he and Conan were friends, and a death in the family was something that it was perfectly acceptable to ask for a little flexibility around, and that he didn’t _need_ to be fitted for a suit - he had a couple in the wardrobe he could re-wear anyway, and there was no way he was going to win (Eddie had said this himself, to be fair, several days prior once he’d found out who Richie was up against, so he supposed that he deserved that one), and that Alison and Jun wouldn’t mind and he could write from anywhere, as long as he had his laptop, even Derry, Maine. 

Eddie hadn’t said anything when his husband told him this, but he’d squeezed his hand, and kissed him on the cheek, and hoped what he’d really wanted to say came across. 

Two days later they take a flight from LA to Philadelphia, then another to Bangor, and then they hire a car at the airport and drive the hour into the countryside, and into Derry, and by the time they get there it’s already dark. 

Richie drives - he always tells Eddie that he hates his driving, because he gets mad at other drivers and starts fights with them out the window - and again, says nothing about the fact that Eddie is so tense and wound-tight he probably wouldn’t be capable of unclenching his fists for long enough to get a grip on the steering wheel. And once again, Eddie is silently grateful.

He’s still tense by the time they pull up outside the old Kaspbrak house, behind his mom’s hollow, rusted car - it hadn’t gotten any use the last couple years of her life, and the Maine winters had not been kind to it. It looks, like many things in Derry, like it’s been there for years, like it has taken root and become one with the ground, with the town itself. Another thing he’ll have to sort, he thinks, and then he thinks that perhaps it can be a job he gives to Richie in the morning - finding a tow company to come get it and take it to a scrapyard, and not for the first time that day he’s glad Richie insisted on coming along. 

He remembers the interior of the house being dark when he was growing up, owing in part to the vast array of foliage encircling it; the multitudinous trees lining the street outside and standing sentinel in the yard. At nighttime, when it was dark outside and he’d laid in bed alone, listening to his mother’s snores and watching pinprick stars slide in and out of sight between the dark clouds, it had frightened him; the way the branches could transform themselves into sneaking, skeletal limbs, the way the white light of the streetlamps and the cold wash of the moon outside crept between the leaves and cast strange, misshapen shadows throughout his room. More than once he’d found himself throwing the covers over his head and curling up into a tight, tiny ball in a panic, convinced the chair covered with clothes across from his bed, or the stack of books crouched on the floor beside his wardrobe were strange, deformed men watching him, waiting for him to fall asleep. 

The trees are still there - all of them bigger now - and the squat bushes which had once lined the foundations of the house have grown feral, winding their way like vines up the porch, grasping at the windows. Eddie imagines them tapping at the panes of glass in the night, softly entreating entry, permission to slither across the threshold. 

Richie grabs their bags from the car, and starts up the path to the front door like it’s nothing, like Eddie’s not still standing alone on the sidewalk, transported back to his childhood.

Eddie supposes that for Richie, it isn’t a big deal at all. Richie had actually enjoyed coming over to the house. 

At first, when they were kids, he’d claimed it was because he was excited to see his favourite lady. Then as they’d gotten older and Mrs Kaspbrak’s patience with him had worn thin, he’d stopped bounding onto the porch and hammering at the front door, and had started scaling the largest tree that grew round the side of the house, edging along one of its larger branches and knocking on Eddie’s bedroom window instead. 

He’d spent many a night in that house, Mrs Kaspbrak sleeping just a room away, blissfully unaware of what was going on beneath her darling son’s blankets.

Those parts of his adolescence weren’t quite so bad, Eddie thinks; those nights weren’t quite so scary. On those nights, trees were just trees; shadows were just shadows.

Meanwhile, Richie has reached the porch. “C’mon, Eds,” he calls. “You got the key?”

Eddie’s legs are stiff, but he forces himself to move, to make his way up the now overgrown path, and the rickety wooden steps, and to pull the key he’d buried in a succession of drawers and cupboards after he’d moved out at eighteen and never looked back from his pocket, and he unlocks the door. 

Sonia Kaspbrak had never changed the locks. 

As he lays his fingers on the handle, Richie says to him, “If you wanna get a room somewhere else we can do, y’know. It’s not a big deal.”

And Eddie loves him for that - he really does - but he finds himself saying, “Rich, there’s like one hotel in this shithole town and you _know_ it’s gotta be infested with roaches.”

Richie says, “You have higher hopes for your mom’s place than I do, baby,” but he steps back, and lets Eddie go in first. 

It’s dark inside - of course - but Eddie finds the light switch as easily as though the last time he was here was just yesterday, and not twenty-two years ago, which distresses him somewhat, though he doesn’t know why. 

Everything looks kind of as expected. The same, but not. The hallway is still narrow and cramped, and his mother’s coats are still tossed over the ancient coat stand that’s been leaning over at an angle in the corner since before he was born. There’s still the old runner rug in front of the door, thinner now, trodden down, faded from the sun that he knows shines in through the windows at the front of the house first thing in the morning. There’s an old picture on the wall opposite, a framed landscape, pale and washed out when he was a boy, almost entirely white now, the rolling hills and faint stream depicted in the print mere ghosts. 

The windows are closed, and the air is kind of stuffy as a result. The house isn’t dusty, but it’s not exactly sparkling clean, either. 

Behind him, Richie nudges the door shut with his hip, drops their bags on the floor. 

He doesn’t say anything, which Eddie is grateful for, just for a moment - then he wishes he would. 

He turns around. 

Richie says, “You tired? Wanna go to bed, baby?” and he can’t do anything but nod. 

There are only two bedrooms in the house, of course - his mother’s, which Eddie is _not_ ready to enter, not yet; that’s a tomorrow job - and his own, which is pretty much the same as it was when he left that late summer morning, his mother crying and begging him not to go from the front steps. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut against that memory.

“We really gonna sleep in here?” Richie asks, sliding past him and into the room. “In your twin bed? Come on Eds, I always wanted to fuck in your mom’s bed -”

“Are you serious?” Eddie says, but he’s laughing, even though he _knows_ he shouldn’t be, and he knows nobody else would laugh at that _horrible_ joke, but then maybe that’s why they work. Nobody else is terrible enough for Richie. 

“Sorry,” Richie says. “Too soon?”

“Always too soon,” Eddie says, and he sits down on the end of the bed. The sheets have been stripped off, so at least he knows his mom didn’t leave the room a total shrine to him after he left. “I’m surprised you’ve managed to hold back an _I fucked your mom_ joke this long, to be honest.”

“Hey,” Richie says, waggling a long finger in Eddie’s face, “no disrespecting the dead, Eds. I know your mom would just love any excuse to haunt the shit out of me.”

Eddie kind of wishes he hadn’t said that. It’s creepy enough, being back in Derry after so long, let alone at night, in his childhood home which is now empty and echoing and creaky. 

Richie drops down next to him. “For real, though. We’re gonna share this thing?”

Eddie says, “I don’t wanna sleep in there.” He can’t put into words how he feels. How he imagines her presence in that room, her things watching over them as they sleep. Despite himself, he momentarily wishes he’d taken Richie up on the offer to book a hotel room. 

Richie doesn’t push the issue. “Okay,” he says, “whatever you want. I have a lot of great memories in this bed too,” and he wiggles his eyebrows. 

Eddie laughs; leans into him. 

He has those memories as well. 

Late nights; crickets in the summer, the thick evening heat slowly dissipating and flowing like molasses out of the windows and down the road. Richie, letting himself in through the window, Eddie hissing at him to be careful every time, convinced he was going to fall and break his neck. 

He’d never fallen out of the window, though he had toppled in a couple of times, landing on the floor and rolling under Eddie’s desk when Mrs Kaspbrak had shrieked and called, “What was that?”

Richie’s hands on his waist, his hips, in his hair. The way he’d pressed his cold feet to Eddie’s calves in the winter, making him hiss and jump. His mouth against his neck, sucking plum-hued bruises into his skin just for the fun of it, bruises that Eddie had needed to cover the next day with his mom’s makeup while she was at work. Bev had shoplifted him his own concealer one afternoon, when he’d turned up to the clubhouse with a huge angry mark just above his collarbone because Eddie had used all of his mother’s up. The next night Richie had come over a little earlier than usual, before Eddie had managed to wash it off, and had bitten down on the spot, then pulled away, wide-eyed, spluttering, lips covered in chalky nude pigment. 

Eddie had nearly cried laughing. 

At Richie’s house, things had been easier. Richie’s parents were kind, and accepting, and they’d let him stay over when he needed to, especially towards the end when things got really tough - but that didn’t mean there weren’t nice memories made here, in Eddie’s small, dim bedroom, beneath the posters of actors and musicians he didn’t really care about but had put up solely to impress the others, and the Star Wars bedsheets. 

Richie says, “I got my first blowjob in this bed.”

“I will murder you,” Eddie says, but he drops his head onto his husband’s shoulder anyhow.

Finding a position to fall asleep in isn’t easy on the tiny little mattress - Eddie isn’t sure how they did it as teens, especially once Richie’s shoulders started broadening and his legs got even more long and gangly - but eventually they manage it, the way they always did, Richie on his back, arms round Eddie’s shoulder blades, Eddie’s left thigh hitched up over Richie’s hips. 

Eddie presses his face into Richie’s throat, and he sleeps, and he does not dream. 

*

He starts with the kitchen. 

There’s still stuff in the refrigerator - milk and cheese and yoghurt, and a few different half-empty jars of sauce Mrs Kaspbrak had never gotten to finish, and a couple of wilting vegetables. Eddie stuffs everything into a garbage bag, holding his breath so he doesn’t have to breathe in the smell of the old fridge, then takes it outside and throws it in the garbage. 

Then he sets about emptying the cupboards - getting rid of boxes of cereal and pasta and condiments - and when he’s done this he starts stacking up the plates and cutlery and cookware. He’s already decided he’s going to donate it. He’s not exactly sure where to - not yet - but he figures there’s got to be somewhere local that’ll take it. 

He cleans the corner cupboard out as well, the one above the counter where all their medicines had been stored. They're still there, he discovers, neatly lined up like soldiers, labels dirty and peeling.

He swallows; closes the cupboard door; opens it again, half-hoping they'll be gone when he looks a second time, but they aren't - of course they're not - and he reaches up, averting his eyes to sweep the pills off the shelves and into a waiting trash bag. Strangely, they’re the only things from his childhood home he feels any inclination to keep. He won’t, of course. Keeping expired medicine is insane. He’ll throw the bottles in the garbage. He will. 

He presses his hands flat against the counter top, steadying himself. Sighs. 

Richie, meanwhile, goes about getting the car taken away. 

There’s an old scrapyard just outside of town he’d told Eddie when they’d first woken up he could remember his dad sending his car when it was worn out and needed replacing, and to their surprise when he’d Googled _scrapyards derry maine_ Joe’s Scrap had been the first suggestion to pop up. 

Joe himself - Joe Junior, actually - comes over to the house that very morning.

From the hallway where he's folding his mother's moth-devoured old coats into a cardboard box, Eddie hears Joe say, "You Richie Tozier? The comedian?"

"That's me."

Joe grunts. "You're from Derry." It isn't a question.

"Sure am."

Joe looks back towards the house. Eddie isn't sure if he can see him through the windows. They aren't exactly spotlessly clean.

"This where you used to live?"

"My husband's old house, actually. Well, his mom's."

Joe hums sharply, considering. "Husband, huh."

Through the window, Eddie watches Richie fold his arms across his torso. His long legs and body give him the same kind of skinny, string-bean appearance he possessed as a child, but Eddie knows the width of his chest and shoulders, the circumference of his biceps. Richie is deceptively strong, and he's taller and younger than Joe is too.

"Yep," Richie says. Eddie's fingers tighten on the parka he's holding.

Joe walks one circuit around the car, and offers Richie a hundred bucks for it if he can take it there and then. 

“You think we just got stiffed?” Richie asks, when Joe has clanked away, the old vehicle in tow. Eddie shrugs. 

Honestly, he would have given away the car for free. It doesn’t matter to him. He just wants to get this shit done with and then go back to LA. 

“You think they’re alright?” he asks Richie, when they’re taking a mid-morning break on the porch, drinking coffee from mugs that had been so dusty they’d made Eddie gag when he’d first taken them out of the cupboard. 

Richie says, “Who?”

Eddie swings a foot at his husband’s ankle. “Rowlf and Lola. Should I call Bill? I wanna know how they are. Do you think they miss us?”

“Yeah, I bet they do. I bet they’re whining non-stop. I bet it’s driving Bill _insane_.” 

Despite himself, Eddie sniggers at the thought. Bill had only agreed to look after their badly-behaved dogs because Audra, who was away filming for some TV show most days at the moment, had insisted on it.

Richie says, “When they see us, they’re gonna go crazy. They’re gonna jump all over and lick your face. That’s how I feel, Eds, when I see you.” He sticks his tongue out lewdly. “I wanna lick you all the time, baby, all over.”

“Shut up, Richie!” Eddie says, but he’s laughing. 

He doesn’t laugh when the time comes to clear his mother’s room, though. After their break on the porch he’d felt somewhat energised; ready to enter that dark room, that place where his mother had held him far too tightly, for far too long, way past the age when he should have had his own bedroom.

But when they go back into the house, and up the stairs, he feels that old cold clamp of anxiety tighten its grip on his lungs once again. 

Richie seems to _know_ \- Richie always knows, somehow; Eddie often thinks he knows him better than Eddie knows himself - and turns to him as they reach the doorway, eyebrows raised.

Eddie nods, his neck feeling stiff and painful. 

Her room is less neat than the rest of the house, and Eddie imagines that in the last days of her life, she might have spent more and more time up here, perhaps not even leaving her bed, as her body gradually began to shut down. It makes him feel claustrophobic; the mental image of her wrapped up in the sheets, windows and doors closed, waiting for the inevitable. 

The curtains, he notices, are still drawn, and the sheets, though peeled back - by the paramedics, he thinks, or perhaps the neighbours who had found her - are still creased by the old weight of her body. 

Realistically, he knows that everything in the house has been touched by her, used by her - some things he still has clear memories of her interacting with; her old armchair, the television remote, certain pans and spoons in the kitchen - but seeing the bedsheets, tossed back as though only moments prior she’d gotten up and padded into the bathroom, twists something in his gut. 

“Eds?” Richie says, and it takes a moment for Eddie to realise that his breathing has shallowed, that his vision is clouding, that he’s trembling where he stands.

He tries to speak, but his mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton. 

“Hey,” Richie says, and Eddie barely sees him, but he can feel one big hand on his back, another on his arm; and then he’s being turned around, led out to the top of the stairs. 

“I can’t -” he says, “Rich, I can’t -”

Richie says, “Come on, let’s get you outside.”

The staircase seems to stretch out for miles and miles below him. 

He says, “I’m okay - I’m okay. I just - let me sit down.” He waves his hand vaguely in the direction of where he thinks the wall is. 

Richie helps him across the hallway - back into his own bedroom - and gets him situated on the bed. 

“Babe,” he says. 

Eddie shakes his head. “I’m _fine,_ Richie,” he insists. 

“I never said you weren’t,” Richie says. He’s knelt down on the floor in front of him, Eddie’s fingers intertwined with his own, his other hand resting on Eddie’s right knee. His jeans are going to get dirty, Eddie thinks. “You breathing okay, sweetheart?”

Eddie swallows, hating that he can’t even do something so simple, so fundamental as breathing without his husband’s assistance. 

Richie knows he’s angry, of course; Richie always knows. “Hey, hey,” he says, and moves his hand from Eddie’s leg to his face, running a long finger slowly down his cheek. “Don’t get mad at yourself, baby. Come on. It’s okay.”

Eddie shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “Sorry. It’s just - I should be able to do this, you know? It’s literally just - emptying out a room. Not a big deal. Fuck.” He rubs his free hand across his eyes, not wanting Richie to see the tears that are threatening to spill. 

Richie says, “Think you’re over-simplifying it a bit there, Eds.”

He’s right, of course. Physically, it may just be emptying out a room, but mentally, emotionally, it’s much more than that. Eddie feels shaky, like he’s coming down with a bad fever. 

_Don’t think about that,_ he tells himself. _Don’t think about getting sick. Not here._

Richie says, “Baby, why don’t you go into town - take all that shit you wanna donate with you. I’ll stay here and tidy up in there.” He doesn’t say, _in your mom’s bedroom_ , but he does gesture over his shoulder.

Eddie shakes his head. “No,” he says, “no, no, it’s fine, Rich, I wanna do it - I _need_ to do it.”

The truth is, of course, he doesn’t want to do it. Not at all. Really, he wishes he could take Richie up on his offer. He doesn’t want to be in this house a moment longer; doesn’t want to be in Derry another second. This town brought his friends together; brought him and Richie together. But now Derry is emptied of people he loves, of people who love him, and nothing else for them remains. He wants to put it behind him, forever now, get on a plane with his husband and go back to the city that he loves, to the house he loves, the home they’ve created together, to his friends and his own bed and his dogs. 

But he has to do this first; has to purge the house of his memories, snip the cords still binding him to the most terrible parts of his childhood, burn the bridges. And when he has done that, he thinks, he will feel lighter, better, clearer-headed, and he will be able to finally, _finally,_ move on. 

He thinks, briefly, about trying to explain this to Richie. He had done, in fact, when he’d got that terrible phone call about a week ago, back in LA. Richie had been out at the time, meeting with his co-writers, and after Eddie had put the phone down he’d felt the largeness of their home more keenly than ever before. Rowlf and Lola had trotted over to him when he’d sunk to the floor in the hallway, tails wagging wildly, thinking it was a game. And Eddie had put his face to his knees and breathed so fast and shallow he’d made himself light-headed.

That was how Richie had found him when he’d returned home an hour later, shaking violently, crying into his hands. He’d stroked his hair back from his face, lifted him to his feet, sat him down in the kitchen, and helped him do the breathing exercises that had been recommended to him by a therapist about ten years prior. 

It was one of the worst panic attacks Eddie had ever suffered, and he’d had a lot of them.

Richie had told him that it was okay; that they didn’t need to go back to Derry for the funeral, or to clean out the house, or meet realtors, and in the end, they hadn’t attended the funeral. He had been terrified of how his few remaining relatives would react when they found out; what they would think, but in the end they hadn’t said a thing - not to his knowledge, anyhow. Richie hadn’t let him answer the house phone for a week, dealing with any calls they received himself, whilst Eddie kept his cell switched off and spent most of his days camped out on the sofa with the dogs, going back and forth on whether or not he should insist on returning home, fending off Richie’s questions about whether he wanted him to book an appointment to see a therapist (he didn’t - he couldn’t - not yet) and offers to go back to Derry alone, without Eddie - with Bill, maybe, or Mike (Eddie couldn’t let him do that, it wasn’t right.)

He’d been so goddamn _mad_ at himself - still was, days later, and still is, now, sitting and shaking on his childhood bed with Richie slowly running his thumb over his knuckles - he’d been doing so well for so long, hadn’t had a panic attack in years - and, perhaps the worst thing was, he hadn’t even known _why_ he’d freaked out like that. 

Richie had told him it didn’t matter so much _why;_ only that he _did_ feel that way.

“It’s okay not to know, Eds,” he’d said, a couple of nights later, when Eddie had finally stopped worrying at his lip, turning the question over and over in his head, and at last expressed the thought out loud, spine to his husband and staring at the inhaler he still kept on his nightstand, despite the fact that, before that week, he’d only really used it once or twice a year, if that. 

Eddie hadn’t argued with him - which, when he thinks about it now, had probably just worried Richie more - but, silently, he’d thought, _but I_ want _to know._

He’d wanted to know - wanted to know why he’d freaked out so badly when he and his mother hadn’t had a relationship in years, not a real one, when he was certain that if the tables had been turned and she’d received a phone call about him, or if something bad had happened to Richie and he’d called her looking for comfort, she likely wouldn’t have given a damn.

He’d wished that _he_ didn’t give a damn. 

He’d wished that he could have gotten the call, said “Good,” coldly, triumphantly, and put the phone down. 

He’d wished he could hate his mother.

He had kept thinking about how, when he was younger and unable to leave the house and hang out with his friends because he’d coughed the night before, or when his mother had called Bev loose, or Richie a queer, or Mike a negro, or Stan a kike, or, even years later, when he was older and he and Richie had decided to get married and he’d emailed her to let her know, preferring that she find out from him rather than see it in some supermarket checkout magazine or hear it from one of her busybody friends, and she’d sent five words back - _I will pray for you_ , even though she’d never really been the praying type when he was a kid - he’d always responded, silently, internally to these happenings with the thought, _I wish she would just disappear._

The truth was, though, that he had never hated her - never, though Richie had expressed his strong dislike for her frequently throughout their teenage years and particularly when he was at NYU and Eddie was bussing tables and bagging groceries and answering phones at a local taxi firm to put himself through community college - but often he’d thought that it would be easier if he did. 

Her health had been in decline over the past few years, according to Maggie and Wentworth, who had long since left Derry but still had friends there passing on the local gossip, and his aunts, who had been in the habit of calling him up about three times a year ever since her first stroke to alternately berate him for leaving and beg him to return to Maine, and once or twice he found himself wondering, in a way that was mildly curious rather than fearful, when she was going to die. 

Bev’s father had died a couple of years previously, from a massive heart attack, and she’d confided in Eddie, one afternoon when she was in LA for work and they were drinking cocktails in the garden together whilst Ben and Richie bickered about the best way to fix one of the big French windows that led from the kitchen to the patio and kept getting stuck and refusing to open - as though Richie knew anything about DIY or home repair - that she was glad he was dead. 

“I keep thinking it’ll hit me,” she’d said, stirring her mojito slowly, sunglasses reflecting Eddie’s face right back at him, “that he’s gone. I keep reading these things online, from people who’ve lost abusive parents, saying they’re upset and they miss them, and they can’t figure out why. And I keep wondering, when am I gonna get that? But I don’t. I’m just glad the fucker’s finally dead.” She’d stretched her legs out, pale even beneath the glowing California sun. “Took him long enough.”

At the time, Eddie hadn’t thought much about what she’d said, only wondered vaguely if he would feel a similar way when Sonia Kaspbrak passed on. He’d almost expected to, or at least to feel a sense of relief, particularly once her health had begun to decline and his aunts started to speak about her in hushed tones, as though she was already on her deathbed. 

Now, he wonders if the panic attack, the nausea he’d felt on the journey back to Derry, the way he can’t even enter his mother’s room without experiencing a complete brain meltdown, is some kind of cosmic punishment for all these cruel, ungrateful thoughts he’s had over the years. 

The thought makes him feel faint, and slightly nauseous. He covers his face with his hands, an automatic, habitual response to fear or upset he’s been trying to shake for years. 

“Eds, listen,” Richie says, and Eddie feels like he’s being sucked through space and time, through a black hole, a wormhole, forwards and backwards through his memories and his experiences all at once, landing in his childhood bedroom with his husband kneeling before him, cupping his hands in his own large palms. “Babe - y’know, it’s midday. Why don’t you go out and get us something to eat? Some sandwiches or something. And, hey, you could take all that shit you wanna donate to the Goodwill on Kansas Street.”

Despite himself, Eddie says, “There’s no Goodwill on Kansas Street.”

“Yeah there is,” Richie says, grinning. “There is now.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He wonders how Richie knows that. So much has changed since they were last here. He thinks he even saw a Starbucks on their way into town the previous night. 

“But I need to,” Eddie says slowly, shaking his head, “I need to - what about my mom’s room?”

Richie says, “It’ll still be here when you get back.”

Eddie guesses it will. Even after they’ve emptied it of all her belongings, all her old clothes and bed linen and expired makeup, after they’ve gone back to LA and sold the house and left Derry behind, hopefully forever this time, the house will still be there, and it will still be the Kaspbrak house, and the room will still be Eddie’s mom’s room, in his mind. 

He swallows. “Okay,” he says. “What will you do while I’m out?”

Richie says, “I’ll get all the rest of this shit packed up. And I’ll call a couple realtors, if I get time. See if we can arrange for them to handle everything. After lunch you can do her room, if you still really want to.”

Eddie thinks it over. “Okay,” he says, quietly. Richie strokes his hand again. “I don’t wanna stay here tonight,” he blurts out. It’s hard to admit, but he can’t - can’t do it. Can’t spend a moment longer here, really. 

“Alright,” Richie says, softly, and it’s agreed - just like that. 

*

Eddie loads the car with bags and boxes of coats, cutlery, crockery, books - everything he can gather - and drives into town.

It’s strange how familiar everything looks. The same, but somehow, oddly, different. Uncanny. He sees the new Starbucks, the old pharmacy, the grocery store that has changed hands in the two decades that have elapsed since he was last here and has the name of a new owner emblazoned above the door and the same shitty newspaper stand he remembers from his childhood out front.

Richie’s right about the Goodwill - he guesses he must have looked it up that morning whilst he was looking for scrapyards, or maybe even spotted it when they were driving into town. Eddie had hardly seen anything. He’d felt like he was lapsing in and out of consciousness ever since getting off the plane in Bangor; the entire drive into Derry is now mere flashes in his memory, like it happened decades ago rather than the night before. The green glowing light of the Starbucks. The black glint of the Kenduskeag winding like a satin ribbon alongside the car. The great ugly Paul Bunyan statue, grinning maniacally through the dusk. Richie had pressed down on the accelerator a little harder, he thinks, when they’d passed that. 

Neither of the elderly ladies working in the store recognise him when he goes in to speak to them about donations - but then again, he doesn’t recognise them either. He carries the boxes in for them, drops everything off in the storage room at the back of the shop to be sorted, and leaves. It feels somehow incredibly underwhelming, the realisation that he will never look at those pots and pans, those cheap paperback romances, those windbreakers and faux fur coats ever again. 

The whole trip takes him less than twenty minutes, and despite the knowledge that the sooner he picks up something to eat and heads back to the house, the sooner they can get out of this miserable little town, he can’t quite bring himself to do it. 

There’s a cafe on Kansas Street - a couple more on Center Street, if his memory serves correctly and they’re still in business - but he can’t do it. Can’t bring himself to head over there and buy something. He stands beside the hire car for a little while, staring at his own distorted reflection in the window and wondering if that’s _really_ what he looks like before he finally comes back to himself. Even then, things don’t feel quite right. He feels like he’s been stuffed into his body, poorly, like a lumpy pillow in a too-small cover. 

He gets back in the car. 

He drives without knowing where he’s going. 

*

The Barrens are deserted, just the way they’ve always been. Eddie had half-expected the woodland there to be cut down; new houses constructed; the land concreted over, or, more likely, transformed into one big dump. 

But the grass is still long and thick and dry, and the little paths snaking between the trees are stony and overgrown. He drives as far as he can; past the kissing bridge, and the mall, and the lone Chinese restaurant that sits on its own solitary lot at the end of Pasture Road, and then when he can drive no further, he puts the car in park and gets out.

It’s quiet, out at the Barrens; that was what they always liked about it, he thinks, as children. Henry Bowers and his gang had rarely bothered to venture out there, and most of the other kids at their school preferred to hang out at the park, or in the arcade. At the Barrens, they’d had miles and miles of wilderness, rough tracks and high cliffs and dark thickets of trees to explore, and no parents or peers to bother them or interrupt their games. 

There’s poison ivy everywhere - he smiles to himself, remembering Stan’s habit of insistently pointing it out after his parents had taught him how to recognise it on a birdwatching trip, and Richie’s instance that surely not all the plants he’d pointed at could be poison ivy - and he covers his hands with the sleeves of his jacket as he picks his way through the undergrowth, careful to not let it brush up against his bare skin. 

He walks and walks, deeper and deeper into the grass and the trees until he can no longer hear the sound of cars. Eventually he finds the edge of the river, its wash slow and lazy today, listless beneath the high, warm sun. He follows its trail, sticking close to the water’s edge, listening to the melodic trill of birdsong, the soft splash of the river against the bank, the crunching of sand and dirt and pebbles beneath his feet. The leather oxfords he’s wearing aren’t exactly perfect for the terrain - he’d left the sneakers he uses for running and walks with the dogs back in LA, not anticipating any need for them in Derry - but the ground is dry, and reasonably flat, so he supposes he’ll be okay. 

Eventually, the river widens out, and dips deeper, darkening to a rich bottle green, and the banks fall away, and the water stills, and he realises, ducking beneath the branches of a buckled old elm, that he’s reached the quarry. Across the water, directly opposite, is a wall of jagged tan rock leading to more topheavy trees, and, he knows, somewhere along the cliff face is the flat little outcrop they used to hock loogies and leap from all those years ago, their bikes abandoned on the path behind.

As a child, the drop had been nerve-wracking, sure, but he’d never _not_ done it. He still remembers the first time they’d jumped, back when it was still just him and Richie and Bill and Stan. 

Bill had jumped first, fearless as ever, then Stan, who had screwed up his face comically and pinched his nose before going. He remembers curling his hands into fists to hide the way they were trembling. 

“Scared, Eds?” Richie had said, teasingly, though he also hadn’t jumped yet. It had never occurred to Eddie that the other boy might have been nervous too.

“No,” Eddie had said, spitting the word out like it disgusted him. 

Richie had snorted, like he didn’t really believe him - which had pissed Eddie off, but then again, it was just the two of them; it wasn’t like he was calling Eddie a coward in front of the others - then he’d said, “If you’re gonna be such a baby about it, I guess I’ll have to push you in.”

He remembers shrieking, “Don’t you fucking dare!” He remembers shying away when Richie had come near him - but then Richie hadn’t pushed him after all. 

He remembers Richie grabbing his hand firmly, his palm warm and just slightly damp against his own. He remembers thinking, in the woozy, half-formed way of a child just coming to comprehend these things, that his mother wouldn’t have liked that, if she’d seen him holding another boy’s hand that way. 

Richie had made as though he was going to drag Eddie to the edge of the cliff - like he was going to wrestle him and send the both of them hurtling over the edge into the deep water below - but he hadn’t. When they’d gotten close enough for the tips of their toes to curl over the place where the rock jutted out and fell away to nothing, he’d stopped. He’d still held tight onto Eddie’s hand. 

“Ready, Spaghetti?” He’d said, and his voice hadn’t been loud or crowing, like he was putting on a big show of teasing him, bullying him into the water for Bill and Stan, who were by that point whooping and splashing one another far below. 

Eddie remembers swallowing down the fear perched at the back of his throat. He remembers thinking of his mother; how she would hate him doing this. 

He remembers nodding his head yes.

*

It’s about an hour later when Richie finds him, sitting on one of the bigger, flatter rocks close to the water’s edge. 

“Hey, sugar,” he calls out in his 1940’s radio announcer voice, picking a path between the birches and the beeches and the stones, “are you rationed?”

Eddie smiles; waves. 

Richie reaches him quickly on his long legs, covering the uneven ground with ease. 

Eddie says, “How’d you know I was out here?”

Richie says, “When you were asleep last night I put a tracking chip in the back of your neck. Did you know I actually work for the CIA? The whole comedian thing is all a front.”

Eddie remembers turning his location sharing on about a month back after finally managing to convince Richie to go hiking with him in Griffith Park. 

“It’s a marked trail,” Richie had told him, when Eddie had asked him to do the same. “I don’t want the government going through all my data!”

“Do you know how many people go missing in national parks every year?” Eddie had said. “If you fall into some ravine and die because you wandered away from me and I can’t find you, then what will I do? And the government already has all your fucking data anyway, jackass, with all those dumbass apps you download.”

“You only care about me going missing because of my money,” Richie had said, sorrowfully. “That and my enormous -”

“Do you know how much your life insurance policy is worth? You’re far more valuable to me dead than alive.”

“So romantic, Eds,” Richie had said, and they’d argued cheerfully about it all the way up to Captain’s Roost. 

“Right,” Eddie says, trying his best not to smile. 

Richie drops down next to him, knees cracking, and they sit side-by-side and look out over the water for a while. 

“They’ve put a guard rail up,” Richie says, after a few minutes have passed. “Where we used to jump from, remember?”

“Probably a good thing. I’m surprised we didn’t break our necks, you know.”

Richie shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s much of a deterrent. You know what we were like. We would have just climbed right over it.”

Eddie says, “I guess.”

They fall quiet for a time. Eddie can hear the other man dragging his fingers through the dirt, tracing shapes into the ground. 

“I’m guessing you didn’t get any sandwiches,” Richie says, after a while. 

“Sorry,” Eddie says. “I just -” He stops. He doesn’t know what to say. 

Richie doesn’t try and fill the silence for him. For a man who usually never shuts up, it’s an impressive feat of restraint, and Eddie is grateful for it. 

“Just needed a moment,” he says, eventually, though he knows it must sound a little silly - the moment has stretched on for well over an hour now; maybe even two. It’s been a long time since he last checked his phone.

“Hey,” Richie says, “don’t worry about it. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

Eddie says, “I know.”

They sit there a little while longer, watching the water slapping languidly against the shoreline. Eddie leans sideways, until he’s pressed up against his husband. Richie drapes a long arm around his shoulder. 

“Thanks for coming,” he says, at last. “I don’t know how - it’s...it’s been harder than I thought it would be.”

Richie says, “That’s okay, baby. And, you know, not to sound like fucking Patty and Stan, but we’re a team, right? I wanna be here for you.”

Eddie huffs a laugh into Richie’s shoulder. “Yeah,” he says, “I know.”

It’s peaceful, down there in the shadows of the woods. When they were kids, Eddie never really thought of the quarry that way; it was always a place for swimming, screaming, fighting, splashing one another, hurling rocks. The water never lay still when they were there. Now the surface looks like stained glass under flickering sunlight; like rich grass in a soft breeze.

“It’s weird being back,” he says, after a while. “For me, anyway. Is it weird for you?”

“Little bit,” Richie says. His thumb moves slowly over the curve of Eddie’s shoulder. 

Eddie says, “It’s like - everything’s changed. But at the same time, it’s all so familiar. Too familiar.”

Richie says, “Did you not want it to be familiar?”

Eddie considers. Somewhere behind them, a woodpecker begins to drill away at a tree trunk. He says, “I didn’t want to recognise any of it. But there’s so much - it feels like it was only yesterday I was last here.”

They slip back into silence. A cloud of midges descends on the water. On the other side of the shore, a heron swoops down, carefully picks its way through the shallows. 

“We should take a picture,” Richie says, gesturing towards it, “for Stan.” He adjusts his position on the rock. 

“Don’t tell him we’re here,” Eddie says. “He’ll ask how I am, then everyone else’ll find out, and they’ll ask how I am, and I - I don’t know. I don’t know how I am.” It feels strange, admitting it out loud. 

Richie doesn’t say anything to this, but he presses his mouth against Eddie’s hair; not kissing him, just letting him know he’s there, Eddie thinks. It’s nice. He closes his eyes. 

He thinks about Stan; thinks about the others. Thinks about the summers spent out here in the no doubt filthy water; biking through the streets of Derry; the clubhouse Ben had built; the Hanlon family’s farm.

They never talk about it, but it’s been poking at the edges of his mind ever since they first rolled past that peeling old _Welcome to Derry!_ sign; his mind has been picking at it like a scab. It’s an old festering wound, one that he’s long since learnt to leave well enough alone. He never speaks about it with Richie; never mentions it to the others. They don’t ever bring it up either, not even Bill. 

He turns to Richie. “Do you ever think about it?” he says. “That summer?”

He feels his husband stiffen beside him; sees the way his jaw tightens. He doesn’t look back as he says, “Don’t think I could forget it if I tried, Eds.”

Eddie doesn’t think he could, either. He bites down on his thumbnail, wonders how many years it’s been since the clown slunk back into its well; since they bunched together in the sewers and held Bill while he cried. 

He says, “I thought I could forget - not that, I don’t think I could ever forget...that. I mean - everything else. My mom. What she did. I thought, if I came back here - cleared the house. Got rid of everything, threw it all away...I thought maybe, if I was the one to do it, if I was the one to throw everything out...” he trails off, forcing himself to focus on a round grey pebble sitting directly beside his right foot. He feels oddly cold, despite the sun, despite his jacket, despite Richie’s warm body right beside him. “I don’t think I can, though.” 

He doesn’t say, _I think it’s a part of me, now._

Richie sighs, close to his ear. 

The green of the quarry water before them is suddenly far too bright. Eddie closes his eyes. 

At last, Richie says, “We don’t have to go back. We can leave, right now, if you like. You don’t need to empty the house. We can leave it. Let it collect dust. We can set fire to it. Burn it to the ground. You don’t owe that place - your mom - you don’t owe them a goddamn thing.”

Eddie swallows. His throat feels packed with something thick and wet. 

“I don’t think I can,” he says again, “I don’t think I can go back there.” Then he says, “And even if I did, I don’t think it would make a difference.”

It’s all symbolic, is the thing. It doesn’t mean anything; getting rid of her stuff; gutting the house; signing it all away to somebody else on a legally binding dotted line. What does mean something, though, he thinks, is this - Richie’s arm around his shoulder. 

The echoes of his friends’ laughter over the water; between the cliffs. 

The hot asphalt beneath the wheels of his bike. 

Maggie and Wentworth’s kind, smiling faces. 

The cows and the sheep at Mike’s farm.

The cool, dusty air of the clubhouse.

He leans a little closer into his husband; thinks about what it will be like to drive back to the airport; to see palm trees out of the window when they land in LA; to feel the wind on his face as they leave LAX in Richie’s stupid convertible; the tap of his dogs’ nails on the hardwood floors of their house. 

Richie says, “You wanna go home, baby?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “but - let’s just sit here for a bit. Just a little longer.”

The water in the quarry before them shimmers and shines, and the slow summer breeze rippling through the trees stills, and the landscape settles. And for a moment, everything comes to rest. 


End file.
